He had been a founder member of the IPTA, an honourary member of the Asiatic Society. Mr Jyoti Basu had been the bestman at his wedding and he had been a survivor of the 42 day fastig the communists had undertaken at the Jayanti jail in North Bengal. He loved his daughter in law and when they had met the first time at her house, he had pulled her aside, "Hey lady, do you remember what Portia had said to Brutus about being a wife? A man needs moulding". A few days before he passed away, at the gathering of the school he had founded, he had publicly apologised for the misery they had all inadvertently caused her "We have destroyed her life, I hope God forgives us all". He kept collecting various versions of Raga Behag before he fell ill and had been hospitalised. He never had a chance to give them to her. She had gone over to their place and had participated in the mourning. When her own father passed away it felt like she had become fatherless the second time.
Life frightened her. It never was what it seemed - life changed everytime she started to think "this is it, this is perhaps the way it is going to be the rest of my life". She always came out the phases shocked and jolted. Every single time. For she was never prepared for change - life changed too fast for her or perhaps she was always too slow to acknowledge life and its flow?
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Mother? Was so fair and pretty, pale blue veins showed on the back of her hands and in hercalves when she lifted her saree slightly to bathe herbaby in the tub. Curly long hair covered her back like a veil when she let it down to dry after a shower. She smelled of incense and flowers and sandalwood soap. She had the baby girl in December while she was visiting her brother in Durgapur. Later, in January, baby was taken to Kathmandu to join baby's father. It was so cold there, she said they had to lace baby's feed with brandy to keep her warm.
Mother had called her elder brother long distance through trunk call. He was a Professor surgeon docked at Shambhunath Pandit hospital then. Doc had laughed at the new parents, "probably baby's father needs it more than baby".
Baby grew up with stories from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, the Gita and of Orissa. Mother and her cousins told baby stories of a great house full of children, of memories of huge cement tanks filled with boiling water with rice soaking in its pit. The boy children secretly dropped eggs in the water ostensibly to 'read the temperature'. Mother's family owned a rice mill there and a stone quarry. Mother showed her the stone utensils around the altar at her house - a little of what had survived the onslaught of a partition and turbulent times. But by the time baby was born they were so poor there was no guineas left she said. So baby's poor father had bought her ten cottahs of land in Durgapur. "Muhdikhai". She sold it off recently when 'baby' wanted to claim it. Baby had wanted to sell it to get money for a trip.
She spoke to baby of home theatre, of the women and children and young men in the family getting together to paint scenes for the home thetare. She told baby how they mixed egg white to get shine and how this painting thing led the brother that was just above her in age, to run away to Shantiniketan to study fine art. She complained how that dented the family's dimishing resources. Pigments were expensive, sable brushes too. Mother complained about how her father who had been a civil engineer, commissioned to build the Nilgiri road in Orissa, had passed away when she was only nine years old leaving the family in utter chaos.
The brother that had run away to Shantiniketan (he had to run away because he had qualified the engineering tests) was the one mother was particulary proud of. "Shejda" was her hero. "Shejda" went on to become a Contemporary Art and Sculpting Professor at the Baroda MC College. Mother, her sisters in law (the doctor brothers wife and the Guajarati sister in law to be) and this brother were all in Shantiniketan, at the same time, together. Mother said this was the best opart of her life.
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Father? His family was the notorious Nags of Barodi. You were not allowed to pass by that house with your shoes on. Or with an umbrellla over your head.
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Baby was in a rage at what was served to her as food. Her mother stood there - she wanted to hit the baby but then she was so tiny - where does all that anger come from in such a little thing? Look at her, she is so red that it looks like she would explode or something. Or choke on the food. Her uncle and two aunts had gathered around baby, (the only one in the house for seven years until the brother was born) and they cackled, "My my my - do you know who you look like when you are angry? So tiny and yet she looks exactly like our father, sister in law, this one's a Nag alright". They made it seem like a virtue, a family legacy and seemed to be proud of baby's temper. Mother would worry. She put a tanpura in baby's hands early in life to teach her to control her outrageous temper.
At night her grandmother claimed her from her mother, and told her other stories, the moral of which she would state very very gently softly in baby's ears so no one else could hear, "anger ruined this family. anger lost us, cost us, everything we had, baby" Then she felt the soft hands of her granny caressing her little seven year old head full of unruly dark hair, "please, please, please, promise your grammy you would never ever give in to anger my dearest little one?"
She is old and middle aged now and cannot remember if she had promised. She remembers dozing off with the whisper soft loving words gently floating down to rest at the bottom of her inexperienced little mind. She wants to think she had promised. She replays the tape in her head repeatedly often hoping to find out how she could rescript and insert a promise where there should have been one.
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Kate O'hehir
jmac1949
James M. Emmerling
Kerry Lauerman
Foolish Monkey
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Salon.com
Comments
I learn a great deal from your posts.
from what Authority? who holds it ?
(oh tis silly. we are all SELF-MOLDING)
Before he passed away at the gathering of the school he had founded, he had publicly apologised for the misery they had all inadvertently caused her "We have destroyed her life, I hope God forgives us all"
inadvertant destruction is like
trying to claim Innocence
by saying one is Ignorant of the Law.
The law is set in the subatomic fabric,
it is: love.